"Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it." Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. {r}evolution

Our mission is to nurture the transformational leadership capacities of individuals and organizations committed to creating productive, sustainable, ecologically responsible, and just communities. Through local, national and international networks of activists, artists and intellectuals we foster new ways of living, being and thinking to face the challenges of the 21st century.

”Children are Solutionaries” School Opens in Detroit by Grace Lee Boggs

LFC

”Children are Solutionaries” School Opens in Detroit

by Grace Lee Boggs

The morning of September 3 I participated in the opening ceremony of the new Boggs charter school at 4141 Mitchell on the east side of Detroit

It was a heart-warming affair, full of the love, sense of continuity and commitment to place that goes into the building of families and community.

It’s all coming together. Twenty years ago we founded Detroit Summer, a multicultural intergenerational program to involve young Detroiters in rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our city with the same commitment and imagination with which SNCC activists were rebuilding, redefining and respiriting the Jim Crow South.

16 year old Julia Pointer was our first volunteer. Today Julia ,

wife of Peter Putnam, mother of William and Lucy, is a co-founder and the principal of the new school where the children are viewed, first and foremost as “Solutionaries,,”

Folk singer Joe Reilly led us in a sing-a-long about the friendliness of trees and animals.

From my wheelchair I showed the little ones a picture of myself nearly a hundred years ago when I was their size.

Julia explains the paradigm shift in philosophy that has gone into the new school:

“We’ve been growing our economy and this is where it’s gotten us. These vacant lots, these abandoned houses. It’s like, well industry is not working here and I can make more money someplace else so I ship it out and all the jobs are gone. And people can’t afford these houses so they leave them.

“But what happens if we grow our souls here? What would it look like then? I want to prepare kids to ask those questions because that’s what’s going to create the future, asking those questions. Not thinking that we have the answer and then telling kids what they should be doing.”

The Boggs School sits on a quiet residential street in a building that’s more than 100 years old. Just across the street is a well maintained white bungalow with a perfectly mowed lawn. And, as is the case with a lot of streets in Detroit, there are several vacant lots here.

The idea of place is a big one for the founders of the Boggs School. The neighborhood where the school sits is going to be a big part of the school. It’s called place-based education and it’s a model that’s already being practiced in small pockets around country. There’s a K-8 school in Boston called Mission Hill which has become a kind of model/sister school to Boggs.

“I want a kid to graduate from our school and be able to look around and be like, I’ve been in this neighborhood forever, I know exactly what businesses will work. I know exactly what the needs are in this community.”

At http://boggsschool.org/ you can find the names of the scores of community volunteers who spent hot summer days sprucing up the building and classrooms.; also the members of the Board of Trustees, and the interns.

Grace Lee Boggs Fund

https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-grace-lee-boggs
Dear Friends of Grace Lee Boggs,
We are writing to ask for your support in keeping Grace Lee Boggs in her home in Detroit as she makes her final transition. As you are well aware, Grace is now 99, and has devoted her life to the struggle to stretch our humanity. Like her partner Jimmy Boggs, she has done so with minimal regard for personal advancement or riches. Grace has been living on a fixed income for quite some time...
https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-grace-lee-boggs

Recent Videos

Boggs Center

Events Calendar

Boggs Center Store

We Are Not Ghost - stories of community businesses, place based education school, spoken word artist. Tales of Detroiters remaking our city with vision and spirit for Next American Revolution.

{R}Evolution In 21st Century The new pamphlet consists of: Changing Concepts of Revolution “Rediscovering the American Past”. “Naming the Enemy” and “Towards a New Self-Governing America 2012

The Next American Revolution Sustainable Activism For the 21st centuryThe Next American Revolution by Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige Now available Hard Cover – Paper Book -Order your signed copy now.

The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (2009 edition)

Revolution & Evolution in the Twentieth Century (2008 edition)

Living for Change (Signed by Grace Lee Boggs)

{r}evolution & or Grace Tee Shirt

Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nations Future

ON Being Krista Tippet

ON Being Krista Tippet
January 19, 2012
We travel to Detroit to meet the civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs. We find the 96-year-old philosopher surrounded by creative, joyful people and projects that defy more familiar images of decline. It's a kind of parallel urban universe with much to teach all of us about meeting the changes of our time.
Listen now

Boggs Center 3061 Field St. Detroit, MI 48214

James and Grace Lee boggs Center To Nurture community Leadership
hpp//www.boggscenter.org / {r}evolution - the two side non-violent revolution in values.
The Boggs Center was founded in 1995 by friends and associates of James Boggs (1919 -1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915 - ) to honor and continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.
Our aim is to help grassroots activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers who can devise proactive strategies for rebuilding and respiriting our cities and rural communities from the ground up, demonstrate the power of ideas in changing ourselves, our reality, and demystify leadership.